Eighteen years in the making, the museum is billed as the first to focus entirely on the history of American public housing, which provided homes for more than 10 million people across US cities over the last 100 years. While its collection draws from public housing in cities across the US, Chicago plays a prominent role, and the city makes an appropriate host for such an institution: It was the home of the largest federally supported public housing complex, Robert Taylor Homes, as well as the one whose poor condition and reputation for crime made it synonymous with the failures of 20th century public housing, Cabrini-Green.
The NPHM occupies a renovated 37,000-square-foot building that’s the last remnant of one of the city’s oldest projects, Jane Addams Homes, a New Deal-era apartment complex demolished more than a decade ago. Its fundraising and development period encompassed the Great Recession and Covid-19, and it debuts amid a raging US housing crisis and a flurry of Trump administration moves to cut staff at HUD and claw back federal housing grants. Just before the opening, Lee received a letter from the National Endowment for the Humanities explaining that support for her museum was in jeopardy because its “vision and mission didn’t align with the executive office,” she told the Chicago Crusader.
It would be hard to imagine a more hostile political climate for a cultural institution dedicated to the notion of promoting the idea of housing as a human right. But Lee says that’s also why the museum is so necessary.
“We have to be engaging with on-the-ground struggles today and also trying to create a future where housing is part of the commonwealth at a time when things are increasingly privatized,” says Lee. “Putting housing and housing precarity into the civic sphere, giving people the history to inform their current conversations, giving people space to do the work where they’re crossing boundaries of race and class is the most important civic mission that we have.”
From the Ruins
The museum’s roots lie in an infamous act of mass housing destruction. In 2000, the Chicago Housing Authority committed to the Plan for Transformation, an initiative to tear down some 20,000 units of public housing stock, mostly located in poorly managed and maintained high-rise complexes like Taylor Homes and Cabrini-Green. It remains the “largest net-loss of affordable housing in the United States,” says Lee. The CHA has still not built back the units they pledged to restore over 20 years ago.
Unlike many Chicagoans, “We can’t go home again,” says Tara Stamps.